Image Copyright the BBC
“You have to listen to the notes they’re not playing.”
At some point in your life, whether in reality or on television, you’ve no doubt heard the statement above used to explain a piece of music, usually jazz, that the speaker thinks the assembled audience is not appreciating properly. Obviously you can’t hear noise that isn’t being made, so what could this nonsense possibly mean? In the case of jazz, I couldn’t tell you. I’m not a musician, despite the best efforts of my parents and a number of frustrated tutors. But to the dismay of the aforementioned responsible adults, I am a pretty good writer, and it turns out this over-uttered cliché is actually quite applicable to the art of crafting fiction. That’s right. An important part of writing any story is the tales you don’t tell.
First of all, there is the question of scope. Unless you’re determined to be a Tolkien or Jordan, you can’t write everything. But just because your story needs a beginning, middle and end, that doesn’t mean the world you’ve created does. Whether or not you’re into exposition and epilogues, some things happened before your story, and in all but the most extreme cases, things will continue to happen after. When you talk about people and events that exist beyond the boundaries of the current narrative, it creates the impression that your fictional world continues to exist independently of the reader, which can make it seem more like the real world.
The Wire is a show dense with examples of subtle or unspoken exposition. Although characters often speak of good times and crimes committed long ago, there are no flashbacks or long soliloquies about life-changing nights. Things happen that hint at the past without explaining it, like Chris Partlow’s reaction to an abusive father or the way Bodie casually informs Cutty that his older brother has “been dead.” A photo on a wall reveals that a dealer called Cheese shares the same last name as foster child Randy Wagstaff. These two characters are never onscreen together and never express any awareness of each other. Is Cheese his father? Big brother? We’ll never know, because the show just drops these reveals at your feet and never examines them again as the narrative plows forward. The viewer is left to wonder on their own.
The key to crafting the perfect untold story is to say just enough to imply a story is there without elaborating too much. Leave a curious blank and the reader’s imagination will race to fill it. Felix Gilman wrote a pair of novels (The Half Made World and The Rise of Ransom City) practically built from narrative implication. In this steampunk Wild West world, every object, person and place has its own story. Among the colorful cast of infamous outlaws there are many more that simply remain mysterious, menacing names. Some are granted superhuman powers by their magic guns, which all have names and legends of their own. They wage a never-ending war against an army of demonic trains that seek to conquer the known world through industry, and even these mute engines of evil have names, their personalities expressed in the different ways they oppress the citizens of their keeps. You can’t read a page without stumbling across references to ancient campaigns and unseen battles, old history books and fragments of local folklore. Cities rise and fall in the space between chapters. Gilman could easily fill another book with all of the stories he left untold, but by letting the reader’s imagination help with the heavy-lifting he is able to expand the world of his story exponentially with a minimum of fuss. It doesn’t have to take six bludgeon-weight novels to make a big, intriguing world for your characters to stumble through. Even if you end up going with the “more is more” approach, it can still be beneficial to leave a few threads dangling in each installment. Then when you call back to them in later episodes you’ll look like the genius who had a plan all along. And after your protagonist has completed the main story arc, you’ll still have a wealth of secondary characters and subplots left to explore.
Details are great, but beware of overdoing it. Remember how cool Darth Vader was when all you knew was that he was a fallen Jedi? Now, how much less cool was it to find out that he basically interned for the Dark Side until he was injured on the job and the Emperor decided to promote him so he wouldn’t sue for damages? If you stoke the audience’s imagination like that, you better have a really good reason for shattering their collective delusions. Exploring the socioeconomics of interstellar trade agreements is not, for the record.
One of the most successful examples of the “too much is never enough” school of storytelling is the long-running British sci-fi show Doctor Who. Even after fifty years and 800+ episodes traveling all of space and time, there are still plenty of tales left untold. Whenever the Doctor recruits a new companion we are teased with incomplete stories of all the trouble he’s been getting into when we weren’t watching, and the companions themselves often talk of off-screen adventures. When the show briefly went off the air, Doctor Who left a narrative gap a decade wide. The Eighth Doctor had only been seen in the abortive TV movie, leaving the rest of his story a big question mark. Dozens of writers would enthusiastically answer it with a deluge of audio dramas, animations, comic books and novels, more than had been produced for any of the previous incarnations of the character. Some of that “supplemental material” even inspired elements of the 2005 revival, like the Last Great Time War that looms ominously in the Ninth Doctor’s past. Battles and atrocities are name-checked but never explained, their importance expressed simply by the reactions of the characters at their mention. All of which set the stage for them to pull the same trick again in the 50th Anniversary Special when it was revealed that a previously unknown incarnation of the Doctor (played by John Hurt) had fought in the Time War, leaving a massive chapter of his life tantalizingly untold. Who knows what wonders are waiting to be discovered in this unexplored story space? If anyone at BBC is reading this, I personally could write about nothing but the Time War for the rest of my life.
An English professor once told me to always write more than what you put in the book. It’s a piece of advice that has stuck with me, and that’s why sometimes I fill an entire journal with notes for a ten-page short story. But just because it can’t all go in the final draft doesn’t mean I can’t leave a few hints that it’s out there, like a treasure hunt for sharp readers. Leaving a part of the canvas blank is a fun way to get your audience to engage with the story and make it their own. That’s why two people reading the exact same book can still come away with wildly different understandings of the story being told.
Be sure to let me know some of your favorite untold stories and what you think “really” happened in the comments.
About the author
BH Shepherd is a writer and a DJ from Texas. He graduated from Skidmore College in 2005 with degrees in English and Demonology after writing a thesis about Doctor Doom. A hardcore sci-fi geek, noir junkie and comic book prophet, BH Shepherd has spent a lot of time studying things that don’t exist. He currently resides in Austin, where he is working on The Greatest Novel Ever.
